Although military units vary based on their branch of service, mission, and composition, each contains the essential core components of personnel, equipment, training, and operations. Regardless of the distribution of these resources, a unit must be capable of four essential tasks:                1. Prepare for Deployment        2. Deployment        3. Sustainment        4. Re-deployment        
Throughout each of these tasks, the unit leadership is responsible for monitoring unit activities and preparing the necessary reports for senior or subordinate units. The manual processes implemented per unit will differ but there is a heavy reliance on manual efforts to update information and an extensive use of hard drive space to store that information as files.
In an attempt to improve their internal business processes, unit personnel often develop stand-alone applications of varying complexity to resolve certain problems. These non-standard solutions are limited to the technical ability of the individual, require continual maintenance (by the creator), and cease to exist when that individual departs the unit. Since this solution is usually maintained on one computer, it is not shared without allowing others to share that computer, resulting in a lack of continuity, an inability to rapidly report unit level information, and the generation of excessive soft-copy and hard-copy documents. As a dire consequence, other members of the same military unit often require the same information in a different format for a different reason, requiring duplication of work product to manage common data.
In recent years, the military has significantly invested in upgrading computers, networks, and increasing bandwidth for units throughout the world. Embracing the interne as a medium for exchanging data, large scale web-based portals have evolved to support military units and personnel at the Enterprise level. Each branch of the service has designed their own web sites to accomplish many useful utilities to include features such as email, chat, file repository, medical records management, orders history, and finance. However, these Internet solutions are only targeted at large scale organizational levels, e.g., Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS), Regional Level Application Software (RLAS), Army Training Requirements and Resource System (ATTRS). Although systems continue to evolve and powerful data repositories, there is no automated support at the unit level; e.g., team, squad, platoon, company, or battalion (BCT).